Follow Me to @JumpStartInc

When I was a kid growing up in the ‘70s, my environmentalist parents would take my sister and me on vacation trips to various national parks across the country, mostly in the West. How embarrassing to admit I was less than impressed by these trips, because I was a smarmy 8 or 9 year old and really just wanted to be at my friend's pool. At this time, I think one of the badges of honor of folks like my parents was to wear a t-shirt, available at each of these parks, with language that followed a standard structure : "Follow me to..." with the name of the park or its biggest landmark on there ("Follow me to Old Faithful", "Follow me to Glacier", etc.) At the time, I could barely imagine wanting to follow anyone to any of these places, and I also couldn't imagine being confident enough to ask someone else - visibly -- to follow me anywhere! But here I am, asking you to follow me. Or rather, follow us, JumpStart. Not to a national park (although I'd love to be able to visit one of those parks now), but in the 2009 use of the term, to follow our 140 character communications on Twitter. Just sign on, search JumpStartInc, and click follow. Easy as pie. I've written a few posts in the past about Twitter, whether it was sticking around, and whether it's the right place for various activities to occur (such as pitching investors). You'll also notice that JumpStart didn't jump into the game as fast as some other organizations. This wasn't because we didn't value it, or think that it couldn't have any good uses. On the contrary: we wanted to make sure that if you gave us the honor of following us, we'd pay it back with valuable, helpful content, delivered at the right time. We'd also work to spread your messages. That activity takes time, so we wanted to make sure we had a resource plan in place so that you aren't disappointed by a start/stop approach, or frankly, overall lameness. So now we are ready and going! And I think you will find @JumpStartInc to be the right place to get the news right now from the entrepreneurial, investing, and Northeast Ohio communities. So it's not a t-shirt, but I'm asking anyway -- follow me to @JumpStartInc, and start following JumpStart today. Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.